Ocarina of Time works out how 3D adventure combat should feel

What happened

Melee fighting had been the awkward part of the shift into three dimensions. Judging distance and facing with a camera the player also had to manage turned sword combat into guesswork. Nintendo's answer was a shoulder button that fastened attention onto a single target, swung the view to keep both fighters framed, and converted movement into a circling sidestep around the enemy. It reduced a spatial problem to something much closer to the readable duels of the earlier two-dimensional games in the series.

Around that sat a connected world with a day and night cycle, a central field linking distinct regions, and a story that jumped the protagonist forward seven years partway through, so familiar locations were revisited under altered conditions. Context-sensitive buttons kept the controller manageable, changing function according to the situation and showing on screen what they would currently do. Horseback travel, timed puzzles and an instrument used to trigger events gave the world a rhythm rather than a checklist.

It arrived to a critical reception few games have matched, and its structure hardened into a template the series itself followed for close to two decades before deliberately breaking with it. Designers outside Nintendo took the targeting system almost verbatim, and it appears, barely modified, in action games released twenty-five years later. That is the most concrete measure of its influence, though the game is more often remembered for its atmosphere and its music than for its interface.

The world at the time

By late 1998 the industry had spent two years learning to build in three dimensions, with the movement problem largely solved and the combat problem not. Nintendo's console was losing the sales contest to Sony while still producing the generation's most technically inventive first-party work, and anticipation for this title had been building since the machine launched.

What it changed

Targeting became a standard feature of action games on every platform. The series followed the template established here through several sequels before the open-world design of its 2017 entry reversed course. The game has been remade and re-released repeatedly, and it remains a fixed reference point in design arguments, to the extent that later adventures are still measured against it.